Class Accounts on Huckleberry

Class Accounts on Huckleberry

Huckleberry is a high performance computing system for deep learning applications. Instructors interested in exploring these techniques as part of a class are welcome to have all their students apply for access to Huckleberry.

Because Huckleberry is not administered in the same way as the other
ARC computing systems, getting class accounts is actually quite
simple: the instructor, and each student, need an ARC account
specifically having access to Huckleberry.

The simplest way for the instructor and all students to get an ARC account with access to Huckleberry is for the instructor to gather the student PID’s (but no student names, please!) and then go to the ARC web pagehttps://secure.hosting.vt.edu/www.arc.vt.edu/
Near the top of the screen is a Submit a Request item. Touching
this item will exhibit a menu that includes the choice HELP,
which opens up an ARC help ticket to be filled out. Enter something
like this:“I request accounts on Huckleberry for myself and my students
for my class MATH3313. I have attached the list of PID’s.”

If the instructor does not wish to send the PID’s, then each student
will need to request an account separately.
For a given student, there are three possibilities to consider:

A student might already have an ARC account, and access to Huckleberry,
in which case nothing needs to be done for that student.

A student may have an ARC account, but not Huckleberry access.
In that case, the student must submit an ARC help ticket, stating
“Please give me access to the Huckleberry system”. To do this, go
to the ARC web page https://secure.hosting.vt.edu/www.arc.vt.edu/
Near the top of the screen is a Submit a Request item. Touching
this item will exhibit a menu that includes the choice HELP,
which opens up an ARC help ticket to be filled out.

A student may not have an ARC account at all. In that case, the student
must request an account, and should specify in that request that access
to Huckleberry is desired. To do this, go
to the ARC web page https://secure.hosting.vt.edu/www.arc.vt.edu/
Near the top of the screen is a Submit a Request item. Touching
this item will exhibit a menu that includes the choice ACCOUNT,
which opens up an ARC account request form.
The requested information includes:

Usage policies:

Because Huckleberry is a new and distinct system relative to other
ARC clusters, new users should be aware that some online documentation has
not caught up to the new realities. For instance, Huckleberry uses SLURM
for is queueing system, but all other ARC clusters use PBS, and so a
document about submitting jobs may still be framed entirely in terms of
PBS. When in doubt, refer back to the Huckleberry user guide.

Students who are new ARC users may need to be reminded that:

if they didn’t request access to a specific system on their account
allocation (such as Cascades or NewRiver), then they don’t have access
to it;

If interactive computations are desired, do not simply
issue interactive computational commands directly on the login node.
Instead, request the reservation of a computational node for, say 10
minutes, with a command like salloc -N1 -t 10:00 and once the
node has been made available, issue a command likesrun –pty /bin/bash to get a login shell.

Non-interactive work is done by writing a SLURM script that is submitted to
a specific queue. Most users will have access only to normal_q.
ECE users have special access to priority_q.

access from off-campus requires setting up a VPN;

The most common problem with student usage is that they use the login
nodes for computational purposes. The login nodes are reserved for
interactive, non-computational work. Computational work must be
carried out using the batch queueing system. Being new, naive users,
students will often violate this policy, which can result in their
account being frozen.